October 20, 2007 – Australian Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd is on the election campaign trail making a promise that made state governments, educational authorities and teachers shudder in their boots. While holding up a laptop which he referred to as “the toolbox of the 21st Century“, he promised to provide a computer to every high school student from grades 9 through 12. Then he became Prime Minister and the pressure was really on, because while he would provide the funding, the Federal Government does not control school education and would not be responsible for implementation – the individuals states would.

For a few years now, Personal Response Systems (PRS) and Student Response Systems (SRS) have been making major inroads into classrooms and lecture halls, particularly in Universities and Colleges. These “clicker” systems literally put engagement, motivation, participation and instant feedback into the palm of each student’s hand.

Microsoft Vista was released publicly and globally on January 30, 2007 and it’s taken only eight months for this troubled operating system to overtake Apple’s computer flagships, the iMac and OSX. In fact, as the graph below indicates, percentage-wise, Apple has either been stagnant or declining over the past five months while in the same timeframe, Vista has shown steady if not strong linear growth throughout each survey.

In the most recent count by the respected W3Counter Global Web Stats, Firefox in all its versions and flavors, has hit a very respectable 25% market share in just two short years since the version 1.0 release. This rapid rise has been on the back of the history of a ubiquitous Microsoft Internet Explorer stumbling through a series of major security breaches, ignorance of World Wide Web Consortium standards and a lack of upgrades. Firefox has also benefitted from a grass roots, sometimes almost militant campaign against IE to “Take Back the Web”, driven by developers and the blogosphere.

No, I’m not referring to Microsoft’s undeserving world dominance at the expense of Apple, I’m talking about Political Correctness. To most people, P.C. is viewed as little more than a joke, but this perception has given it the ability to insidiously erode the foundations and values that make up a democratic society. Like a termite colony, P.C. has been munching on logic, commonsense, discussion and free speech. Our society depicts a strong, healthy and modern facade, but a tiny scratch to the surface reveals an unsure, hesitant, cautious, insecure and frightened population.

We’ve all seen the ads. “Hello, I’m a Mac”, “And I’m a PC”. If not, go here. I can’t think of any other TV advertising campaign that has a running series spanning fifteen different ads over such a short period of time. Sure, we did have the old Pepsi vs Coke Taste Test ads – the ‘Pepsi Challenge’, and this very clever one, but they don’t go anywhere near highlighting so many differences between two directly competing products as the Apple campaign does.